Will ‘Silver Tsunami’ Ease Housing Crisis?
Could the key to solving the housing crisis be boomers leaving their empty nests?
“Older individuals are expected to either downsize – right? – or when they move on and pass the home on to their kids, potentially, their kids would not want to live in these older, bigger homes, and actually put them on the market for sale. And so a lot of people have thought, maybe if we get the silver tsunami, maybe affordability could improve.”
To read the full story, click here for U.S. National Public Radio.
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And so where do older people move? Into rentals with no assurance you can pay soaring rents in 5 or 10 years or that you won’t be forced out? Postage stamped condos with condo fees that are going through the roof…and the politics are often combative? Until the housing market is protected from private equity financialization and money laundering caused price increases….we are all stuck where we are. There is a reason it takes 8 months to rent an apartment in Ottawa. Oh…if you care about elders, then you would mention that staying in their community leads to better health outcomes.
A business associate once said “you don’t want to run out of money before you run out of time”. Based on the fact none of us know when our eyelids will be covered with those little “x”s, and that our home is our most valuable asset, don’t expect seniors to sell their homes for a mere pittance. Additionally, seniors are now generally in better physical condition than previous generations because we continue to exercise, eat healthier, and are less likely to be smokers. Yippee for us!
If this was a news story, the headline would be: “Politicians Prove Once Again, You Can’t Suck and Blow at the Same Time”. Politicians at all levels have gone to great lengths to bring in programs to encourage seniors to stay in their own homes as long as possible from tax credits for accessibility retrofits, government supplied homecare support to deferring property taxes for seniors until they sell their homes (this is quite prevalent in BC and Alberta and Ottawa). Some of these property tax deferrals target lower income seniors such as Ottawa’s but BC’s is pretty universal. By encouraging seniors to age in place (which has great social benefits for seniors), they then suddenly wonder why most seniors will opt to not sell their houses until they absolutely have to. This has helped to limit the supply of family size homes available for sale. We have seen the results of the law of supply and demand with unsustainable levels of immigration creating more demand than there is supply. At the other end, governments have lessened supply by keeping seniors in their homes as long as possible and their family size homes off of the market. As is often the case in politics; try to fix one problem and you just create or exacerbate another problem.